Using Templates

Templates are one of the huge time savers in ViralMailProfits. Imagine writing one email with one standard set of macros.

Then imagine going to any mailer, being able to recall that template and the macros are automatically replaced by the right macros for that mailer! Imagine your link being automatically replaced by a new, unique tracking link every time you use that template! Imagine that it's a text template but it's converted to HTML automatically if you're on an HTML editor!

Imagine being on a mailer and being able to instantly pull up any of your templates (sorted by category to make them easier to find), being able to see the last template you used on this mailer and which template has had the best click-through rate on that mailer!

Creating Templates

You can either create templates in the ViralMailProfits members area or you can do it from UltiSend. To create a template from within UltiSend, simply type or copy & paste your email in the mailer editor and make sure you tick 'save as new template'.

We recommend that you go to the ViralMailProfits members area when you first save a new template and do a little housekeeping before you attempt to use the template for the first time...

UltiSend will have given the template a default name - change that to something more suitable. If you will be having a lot of templates then take the time to create categories for your templates and assign a category to each one - this little bit of extra time initially will make life much easier ongoing.

About the #link# macro

Some people like to put links in the body of their email, some don't. Some mailers allow you to have a link in the body of the email, some don't. So how is all this handled?

Every email body template has a URL associated with it - the main URL, the one that will be used for the credit link.

When you place the #link# macro in the body of your email, it will get replaced by the main URL on those mailers that allow it, while on mailers that don't, #link# will simply be deleted - elegantly handling all mailers with one template. Do make sure that your email makes sense if #link# gets blanked, e.g. don't put visit #link# now. Keep it simple or use a bit of imagination...

An odd => on a blank line won't raise eyebrows. The latter works fine if #link# is deleted.

Other Macros

You can (should) use #firstname# in all your ViralMailProfits templates. However, when you save a template from UltiSend, you can leave the macro you use for that mailer and UltiSend will convert it to #firstname# before it saves it. Then, when you use that same macro on another mailer, it'll automatically get replaced by the right macro (the macro used is set up for you with common mailers). If you're using user-defined mailers, you need to tell ViralMailProfits the macro for that mailer - you do this in the members area of ViralMailProfits (go to mailers and edit the mailer).

Using Templates

Using templates is trivially easy once they're set up. Visit your next mailer and go to the send page. If it's not already showing, click the templates icon on UltiSend. You'll see three dropdown boxes. The first lets you choose a category - either all or a specific category. The next lets you pick your subject line and the third lets you pick your email body. Then just click fetch template - it really is that simple. There are more advanced options too - e.g. you can pick directly from either the last 3 templates used at this mailer or even pick between the 3 best performers at this mailer.

An extremely useful and simple feature is fetch last used. As the name suggests, this will automatically use the same template you used for the last mailer - so if you're doing a batch of the same email, this is perfect.

For more information on templates, see the help within ViralMailProfits itself.